NITI Aayog has partnered with Perlin, a Singapore-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm, to launch a global hackathon for developing solutions aimed at creating social and economic impact in India.
The move is to source sustainable, innovative and technologically enabled solutions to address various challenges in the development space, in line with government’s mission of ‘AI for all’ articulated in the National AI Strategy.
The objective of this hackathon is to promote awareness and subsequently develop solutions that deliver the twin benefit of efficient computing to address the infrastructure challenges, while also not compromising on the privacy of data for training AI algorithms.
The idea is to develop solutions in distributed computing and privacy preserving techniques such as multi-party computation in AI.
The hackathon will be run in two stages, stage one ending on January 15, 2019, and stage two, which will only include shortlisted participants from the previous stage, will conclude on March 15, 2019.
Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog said, “The AI for All Hackathon underscores the commitment of NITI Aayog to supporting meaningful social, economic and technological advancements directed at making people’s lives better.”
He also said, “We believe India is ideally positioned as a thought-leader and regional economic power to help bring the benefits of innovation in AI and distributed computing to communities in developing countries around the world.
The ‘AI 4 All Global Hackathon’ was announced at the AI conference organized by NITI Aayog, in partnership with the ORF, held in Mumbai in November 2018.
Niti Aayog is inviting developers, students, start-ups and companies to develop AI applications to make significant positive social and economic impact for India, a statement said.
The challenge question seeks to develop solutions in Distributed Computing and Privacy-Preserving techniques, such as multi-party computation, in AI.
The first hackathon of NITI Aayog, ‘MoveHack’ was organized in August, on the sidelines of the Global Mobility Summit 2018. Its aim was garnering cutting-edge mobility applications.
Over 2,000 submissions were received out of which the top 10 teams were awarded at the summit.
